It’s surprisingly easy! All you have to do is:
1. Login to your Dashboard
2. Locate the Settings section in the sidebar (should be near the bottom)
3. Click on the Permalinks option
4. Under Common Settings click on radio button beside Custom Structure
5. In the text box enter /%postname%/
Then, for every post, Wordpress will automatically use the post title (inserting “-“ between the words).

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This is on another post on this forum, but I thought was useful to include this here as well for organizational purposes:

Alexa Ranking is pointless. There is nothing valuable in getting high rankings in Alexa. When you're focused on this type of stuff, it sounds a bit desperate.

The bottom line of building traffic and rankings is to write original and valuable content that people want to read and a bit of On-Page SEO. It's not as technical as you may think it is. You need to concentrate on organizing your content professionally and use a bit of robot smarts.

Use the H1 tag for the on page title, a couple of H2 tags for sub titles. If you have a blog you can use H2s for all the titles of the search results (however you may want to put a nofollow on your search pages for preventing duplicate content).

Utilize the meta title of the page - be short and to the point. Use the same words in your URL separated by dashes (verified by Matt Cutts).

Throughout your content, use these tags p, strong and em to emphasize specific important points.

Link to useful links for information, not to sell something. If they want to buy something from you, they will find it on your page. This is what I mean:

If you want to build traffic to your website, you should focus on search engine optimization.

And search engine optimization would link to INFORMATION about search engine optimization instead of buying your SEO services... You'll have a higher rate of traffic which brings you more value, which puts your Google position higher, and increases your Alexa Rank.

But honestly, if you target Alexa Rank, you're just screwing yourself over.

You can earn your spot on the first page on Google for many keywords, with a 0 PageRank page and no backlinks. All it takes is perfect on-page SEO. And your on-page SEO might as well work as your on-page SEO, because people will find your pages valuable.

SEO Tip of the Day: Monday, August 30, 2010 - Treat External Websites as Your Own

Treat external websites as your own.

It is just as valuable to write content on your website as it is for you to write on other websites. Give the internet quality content, especially when your website's credibility is linked to it (nice little pun for you).

Sure, spreading your link on the internet with basic, non-original information will work for you in building backlinks. You can absolutely trick Google into thinking that you're writing something that makes sense or that people want to read - since AI is not perfected, Google bots won't "think" like humans...yet.

Sacrifice your best article topic for sites like suite101.com or ezinearticles.com, because the credit is yours. Make the pages you mark valuable. And the value will trackback to you (another clever pun).

The idea is to use keywords and concepts of your previous article titles to form new ones. Also, you can use the text inside the article to create specific topics. As long as your articles are not elongated books, there is plenty of ideas you can pick off from your written work.

If you are just starting and haven't writing one article, just go to an article website, type in the topic you want to talk about, pick any article you see and try to come up with new article ideas.

Eventually, you'll get really good at coming up with ideas that you won't need to do this. You'll get to know all those thoughts in your mind real well - the more you write articles, the more organized and visible your thoughts will be. I hope this helps you increase your website traffic.

Just a little tip for ya'll to think about. I found this article on the search engine watch website.

SEO, Meet Server. Server, Meet SEO

Quote:

Servers are often a mysterious area, even for experienced search engine optimization (SEO) specialists. A server administrator or hosting company often handles that area of websites, which can lead to a lack of knowledge about them among SEOs.

Servers play an important role in SEO and deserve more attention than they get. Here are some tips to get you started in learning more about this area of SEO.

If you have any comments about what's been talked about in this article, either make a post on article itself or create a fresh thread here on the V7N forum for all of us to discuss this even further. Remember your choice of where to host your site is the most important thing to remember. Do research on the hosts that you have in mind, ask for advice about hosting companies in our web hosting section. We have a lot of web hosting business owners that will help you out in that section.

Thanks

Last edited by mjtaylor; 09-01-2010 at 07:11 AM.
Reason: change date of tip

SEO Tip of the Day: Thursday, September 2, 2010 - Content Development for SEO

In the rush to get fresh content onto a site, webmasters often create new pages or posts without giving much thought to the impact of the content on the website as a whole. Too often, they do some long tailed keyword research and write something optimized for that phrase.

Better Approach: plan your content additions as you did your original site. Outline what sorts of articles and “link bait” lists and resources you want to create. Plan a series of articles to build on a theme that supports a keyword group. For example, if your site is about writing for the web, you might plan to include these articles:

Content Writing – Setting Your Style

Copywriting – Famous Calls to Action

Editing for SEO – When To Forget Keywords

Of course, you can’t anticipate what news stories may arise, but you can plan your overall thrust, and when there is news in your industry, write about that. It’s also more effective for both users and search optimization to expand on the theme of an existing article, rather than starting at zero each time, build upon already published content.

SEO quizzes can be a great way to test and *expand* your knowledge. One of my favorite bloggers, Bill Slawski, (known for his examination of Google and other search related patents) thinks it's fun, too:

This SEO tip of the day is just a reminder for everyone. It's not really new information but sometimes hearing the same thing over and over again will make you remember to not do this.

Check out this blog post and also read more good tips on this blog if you have some spare time.

5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid

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Whether you own a small three page hobbyist website or a monster E-commerce store there are several things you can check to ensure you are not placing any barriers in the way of your search engine optimisation campaign.

Below you will find the 5 most commonly checked areas when a website is critiqued by an outsider. Any webmaster has the ability to check these and, depending on your content management system, you should be able to fix them.

More and more people are using there phones to search the web besides the normal way of using there PC's. If you plan to make a site for mobile users then knowing some key SEO tactic's to do can make a big difference for your website's conversation rate.

Here is some information i dug up to get you started.

Mobile SEO Preparation for a Semantic Web

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The market of 4-billion-plus mobile phone users — and not just high-end smartphones like the iPhone, but also the still-growing Android devices — easily eclipses the approximately 1 billion computers worldwide. That’s a quadrupling of reach for Internet Marketing. To prepare your sites for expanded search growth in a semantic Web 3.0, you must make sure your site is not only mobile friendly but also touch friendly.

With so many things that are free online, it’s easy to get the idea that you can throw up an inexpensive – or even free – website and starting raking in the bucks. Does it ever happen? Sure, but it’s an extremely rare story. Will yours be different? Probably not, but if you take the time to learn what it takes to have success in the search engines, you are less likely to waste your money on a site that won’t ever have a significant position in the free results of Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Above all, you need a search engine and user friendly site. Any SEO can tell you stories of website owners who hired them after the website was built -- and had to have the site completely redesigned because it was so not every going to rank well. That makes that cheap site suddenly much more expensive.

You don’t want flash (that’s not cheap, anyway) or anything in frames – not even iframes, and you don’t want a site full of javascript or other code that could be called from the server instead - it will just push your important keywords down the page. Don’t believe a template or content management system is search engine friendly just because they say it is.

Due diligence is your watch word. Read everything you can online about SEO before you take the first step. Join forums like this; read this entire thread, and ones that are similar. Ask questions. Take free tutorials; read articles. Familiarize yourself with all the general terms, at least, for web design, hosting and SEO. Then when you hire a designer you will be able to determine whether their work is SEO friendly. You will come to the planning table with enough information to understand whom you need to hire for design and for optimization, what they will have to do, and what your role in marketing will be.

Learn about all the elements that need to go into marketing your site once it’s launched – social media, backlink building, on-going content generation, blogging, article writing. Think carefully about who will perform each job. Can you trust someone else to Tweet? Are you going to write the articles or find a copywriter? Who will find and submit your site to good, niche directories? And remember, you get what you pay for – in design and marketing. If you've done your homework, when you see an ad for backlink building or directory submissions, you’ll know whether that’s a good deal or too good to be true.

If you are like many newer and even many experienced SEOs, 301 redirects are something of a may may well know, a 301 redirect is a status code that tells the a requesting user (spider or browser) that the page or resource requested has been permanently moved to a new location. It is the SEO-friendliest way to redirect to a new page as it preserves PageRank.

301 redirects might be used when a site moves to a new domain or to address duplicate content issues on a site. It can also be used to consolidate incoming affiliate links.

Matt Cutts: Typically, the 301 Redirect would pass PageRank. It can be a very useful tool to migrate between pages on a site, or even migrate between sites. Lots of people use it, and it seems to work relatively well, as its effects go into place pretty quickly. I used it myself when I tried going from mattcutts.com to dullest.com, and that transition went perfectly well. My own testing has shown that it's been pretty successful. In fact, if you do site:dullest.com right now, I don't get any pages. All the pages have migrated from dullest.com over to mattcutts.com. At least for me, the 301 does work the way that I would expect it to. All the pages of interest make it over to the new site if you are doing a page by page migration, so it can be a powerful tool in your arsenal.

SEO Tip of the Day: Thursday, September 9, 2010 - Hashtags in Microblogging

Hashtags can be good for your relevance. When you mark a post on a microblog (Twitter or indenti.ca for example), use a hashtag (#) on the most relevant keyword in your post. Hash tags can tell Google bot that your content is relevant for a particular term - and raises the likelihood of your post appearing in real time results. It also helps the microblog categorize your posts by a keyword and your post will appear to other users who search that term. Hashtags can also be used for marketing to others; to "start a conversation," says Steven Campbell, in this post, http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...tter-hashtags/:

Quote:

Usage of hashtags can be an effective marketing strategy in that it allows them to start a conversation and chat with potential clients/customers in a real-time Twitter-based environment. This also allows them to be more creative with their marketing strategy. Events and contests carry hashtags to help promote their products and send more traffic to their online stores and product pages. It is a cost effective way of marketing and building brand recognition.

For a blog just content is not enough. You have to manipulate your writing and start to blogging with style to get good traffic. Further please read the article below:

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It’s a fact that top blogs are known not only for their content, but also for their style. This means that the tone of each post is approachable, the subject matter is interesting to both a global audience and a niche group, and the quality of the writing is far superior to the barely-coherent ravings that constitute social networking pages. Bad writing is easy to find on the Internet, so make sure that yours is different. You’ll soon gain a following of readers who recognize the credibility you’ve built by constructing and maintaining a successful, unique, clean style.

If I had an article for every time I heard 'Content is King, I'd have a very large site. . Finding fresh, relevant ideas which are helpful both your visitors and make fresh spider food can be a challenge. Here are some possible topics and ways to find new content.

Express yourself – if you have an idea or disagree with an industry trend, write about it.

Collect email support questions and make an FAQ

Another great resource to generate ideas for an FAQ or for articles is Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions Tool. Put in your keyword, press the search button the tool generates a list of questions people are already asking – and how often they ask it.

Are you new to SEO and eager to learn how to make your website rank well in the search engines? You’ve been reading the forums and columns like this one, but really feel you need a bit more structure to learn the best practices and techniques? There are several options online that can help you gain the SEO knowledge you need to succeed - for free!

Bruce Clay’s page, http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm outlines the process clearly and provides a host of tools to help you with keyword research, your competitor’s keywords, how to add them to your website, an overview of link building and rank checking. Paid training is also offered.

Todays tip is just a list of SEO tools that you should think about using. I know most of these tools have been talked about on V7N already but no one has put together a good list like i just found. Remember if you want to comment on this create a seperate thread.

The MEGA List of Free and Paid SEO Tools the Professionals Use

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Honing your search engine optimization (SEO) skills goes well beyond tips and tricks you read in tidbits across the web. It requires time, patience, testing, and a lot of research.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of moving parts including the personalization of search results based on past search behavior, localization, language, user experience, and a host of other potential ranking factors. Fortunately, there are literally dozens of tools that can help, whether they're free, freemium, paid, or even "no cost to you."

One the most common mistakes that many Webmasters and SEOs make is that they misuse the robots.txt, the META-robots and the rel=nofollow anchor attribute. All the above affect the indexing, the crawling and the PageRank distribution and as a result they can heavily affect the SEO status of a website and its rankings. In this article we will see what is the impact of robots.txt, META-robots and rel=nofollow on SEO and how you should use them to improve the rankings of your website.

You Can Track Google Instant Behaviors Using Web Analytics
There are a couple of ways you can do this:

BASIC: Segment your reports to track search queries from Google that come via these browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. However, this method will only track the fully predicted keyword referrer, and you will need to add more browsers as they become supported.

ADVANCED: Some bright sparks at Semetrical have already identified a unique parameter within the Google Instant that passes along the inputted characters into the search field. Look for the parameter 'oq=' and you will see that it matches your current text input - see screenshot below. To get your account setup to track the actual inputs against the referrers, checkout Semetrical's guide on how to track Google Instant in Google Analytics. This method will enable you to track the actual query input against the predicted referrer, which means you can see how many search suggestions your site appears in.